From: Just Another Victim of the Ambient Morality <ihatespam@...>
Date: 2007-11-20T04:15:01+09:00
Subject: Why does IO.readlines() keep newlines?

    At the very least, the win32 implementation of Ruby's IO.readlines() 
method keeps the newline character on each string in the array.  Considering 
that it is the newline that defines a "line," it would not be wholly 
unreasonable to omit it from the array, returned.  I would have imagined 
that it was implemented using String.split(), which omits the splitting 
character.  On a simply practical note, I'm sure the former is more popular 
than the latter in the following:


out = File.open('file.txt', 'r'){|file| file.readlines.collect{|line| 
line.chomp}}
out = File.open('file.txt', 'r'){|file| 
               }


    ...in that rarely do people actually want newlines in their strings.
    Interestingly enough, I discovered this behaviour from a bug in a 
program which was hidden by another peculiar function, puts().  Can you 
imagine my surprise that puts() not only appends a newline to a string 
printed to stdout but, if a newline already exists, it doesn't bother 
appending one!  So, printing strings with puts() can hide whether strings 
have a newline or not.  Weird...
    So, who thinks my suggested change is a good idea?  How do I go about 
popularizing my opinion?
    Thank you...